“THE WOMEN” of the Silver Screen

March 22, 2025 | Celebrating Women’s HistoryI Film, Film & Movie Star Photographs, Hollywood History, Movie Memorabilia, Star Power, Vintage Original Publicity Photographs, Vintage Original Studio Photographs

WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

March is Women’s History Month with the theme for 2025 being “Moving Forward Together! Women Educating & Inspiring Generations.”

It celebrates the collective strength and influence of women who have inspired generations and recognizes their role in shaping society.

Walter Film joins in honoring the women of the silver screen, who have, from its very infancy, played an essential role in holding a mirror up to the multi-faceted role women played and continue to play in life and in society. For without their beauty, intelligence, passion, wisdom, grace, humor and humanity, where would film and we be without them?

The Women (1939)

The above photograph from The Women, is the closing scene of one of the most famous films of the 1930s with the wittiest of scripts and dialogue and based on Clare Booth Luce’s Broadway play of the same name. Through cat fights and nail polish, calisthenics and cheating husbands, boatloads of gossip and backstabbing, it captures the lives of the “ladies who lunch” and a second-hand view of the men (who never appear) they marry, have affairs with, and divorce.

What Turns Trash to Treasure?

Some might say, in today’s open society, the film is nothing but “High Camp.” However, at the time, it was and remains a brilliant introduction to a slice of life most people never knew, and certainly never experienced. The element that took it from “just a silly comedy about a bunch of ‘rich bitches’” is its humanity, its brilliant script, the exceptional direction of George Cukor and the Queens of MGM. The ladies who lunch is a “who’s who” list of some of the most gifted actresses and stars of their day: Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Mary Boland, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Phyllis Povah, Virginia Weidler, Lucile Watson and Marjorie Main.

A Photograph Where Everyone Lives

The photograph captures the climatic final scene of the film, in a New York City nightclub ladies powder room, where a major showdown between the film’s main characters, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, reveal their significant dislike for each other. There were no lives lost, nor garments rendered, only strong, determined, talented women doing what they do best — holding a mirror up to nature.

WOMEN WHO DEFINED THEIR SEX

**Alia Nazimova in Eye For Eye (1918)**

Adelaida Yakovlevna Leventon (Alia Nazimova) was born in Yalta, Crimea, Russian Empire in 1879, was a Ukrainian-American actress, director, producer and screenwriter. She became a star on, Broadway where she was noted for her work in the classic plays of Ibsen, Chekhov and Turgenev. She later moved to Hollywood and slient film, where she quickly bacame an international star. She created and worked under Nazimova Productions from 1917 to 1921, serving as a producer, editor, lighting designer, both writing and directing films under pseudonyms. Her film Salome (1922) has become a cult classic, regarded as a feminist milestone in film, and In 2000, the film was added to the National Film Registry.

With her career fading, and left with few options, she returned to New York with an acclaimed performance as Mrs. Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts. Critic Pauline Kael described this as the greatest performance she had ever seen on the American stage.

Nazimova was bisexual and openly conducted relationships with women while being married to a man. With the coming of the Great Depresion, she added 25 rentable villas to her estate, at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights Blvd. across from the famous Schwab’s Pharmacy, in what is now West Hollywood, creating the Garden of Alla Hotel which became a notorious retreat for a caravan of stars throught the 1950’s.
For Reference

Lois Weber in The Angel On Broadway (1927)

Florence Lois Weber (June 13, 1879 – November 13, 1939) was an American silent film actress, screenwriter, producer and director. She is identified in some historical references as ‘the most important female director the American film industry has known’, and among ‘the most important and prolific film directors in the era of silent movies. Film historian Anthony Slide has also asserted, ‘Along with D. W. Griffith, Weber was the American cinema’s first genuine auteur, a filmmaker involved in all aspects of production and one who utilized the motion picture to put across her own ideas and philosophies’.

Weber produced a body of work which has been compared to Griffith’s in both quantity and quality and brought to the screen her concerns for humanity and social justice in an estimated 200 to 400 films, of which as few as twenty have been preserved. She has been credited by IMDb with directing 135 films, writing 114, and acting in 100.

Weber has been credited with pioneering the use of the split screen technique to show simultaneous action in her 1913 film Suspense. In collaboration with her first husband, Phillips Smalley, in 1913 Weber was one of the first directors to experiment with sound, making the first sound films in the United States. She was also the first American woman to direct a full-length feature film when she and Smalley directed The Merchant of Venice in 1914, and in 1917 the first American woman director to own her own film studio.

“Few men, before or since, have retained such absolute control over the films they have directed—and certainly no women directors have achieved the all-embracing, powerful status once held by Lois Weber. By 1920, Weber was considered the premier woman director of the screen and author and producer of the biggest money making features in the history of the film business.” (Wikipedia).

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Radcliff Hall (source) Children Of Loneliness (1937)

“Children of Loneliness was very loosely based on Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness, a boldly lesbian novel that still stands as an important literary work. As adapted by screenwriter Howard Bradford and the film’s director Richard C. Kahn, Hall’s relatively sedate story is fully jettisoned in favor of a far more lurid melodramatic tone.
The tone of the film is echoed in the letter sent to the Library of Congress by the film’s producers when the film was submitted for copyright in March 1935. ‘Children of Loneliness concerns itself with the story of those unfortunate members of society known as inverts whose sexual instincts have been misdirected to such an extent that they approach the state of degeneracy.’ It describes this ‘scientific presentation’ as ‘an absorbing subject that deals with the manifestations, evil associations and mental complexes that affect and misdirect normal adults into channels resulting in homo-sexuality…’
While the film presents an extremely negative description of homo-sexuality, capturing societies attitued towards it, it also justifies the value of the film’s presentation. But, what it also does, and is the sub rosa point of the film, is to introduce the reality that homosexuiality is, in fact, a real and vibrant part of socieity.
No copy of this film is known to have survived, and this single photo is the only one we have ever seen.
For Reference